CITIES IN FLUX

From Extraction to Regeneration
— Mary Mattingly

Public Art as a catalyst to re-vision dominant narratives that presume exponential growth

In a city where over one-third of the population lives in what is considered a food desert,[1] picking plants in public is deemed destruction of property. Swale, a public artwork installed on the Bronx River from 2016-2018, uses the ‘common law’ of the water as a loophole to accomplish what has been illegal on public land. A floating food forest built atop a 5,000 square foot barge, Swale travels to public piers in New York City welcoming visitors to harvest herbs, fruits, and vegetables free of charge.  

Access to basic needs like clean air, water, and healthy food varies for city dwellers at uneven rates, often depending on income. Intensive industrial farming and other forms of extraction like logging and mining have long contributed to degenerative ecosystem health that affects both urban and rural communities. Created in cities reliant on sites of extraction for most daily activities, Swale and another public artwork, Ecotopian Library, work closely with residents in collaborative design processes and emphasize traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) that has endured in Indigenous cultures worldwide.[2] In a country bound by a powerful shift towards privatization of public spaces, infrastructure, and services, Swale and Ecotopian Library both seek to increase access to public food, land, and knowledge commons. 

Swale is a folly that resembles a small island bobbing on the water at the edges of New York City’s land. Venturing onboard offers a perspective shift: while sitting in an orchard atop its hill the city appears to be moving, not the island. A folly can be a platform from which to engage people’s attention and then ask important questions. Neighbors at docking locations exchange practical knowledge around soil, water, and the edible and medicinal qualities of local, diverse perennial plants.

Swale is run by a group of young people through the NY State Summer Youth Employment Program (NYS SYEP) with facilitators from Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (YMPJ). It builds supportive coalitions in order to urge city agencies to legalize food foraging on public parkland. People who steward parks, fight local environmental justice issues like asthma,[3] have home gardens, or belong to community gardens are all able to align support with initiatives for public food. In 2017, New York City (in part) repealed an ordinance that regarded foraging as destruction of property by launching its first “Foodway” in Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx. In a city with only 100 acres of designated community garden space versus 30,000 acres of public parkland, the “Foodway” is a place where anyone can come twenty-four hours a day and pick fresh foods for free. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “Foodway,” Dariella Rodriguez, Director of Community Organizing for YMPJ said, “Being a part of the Swale project, both for myself, and as an organizer who works with young people, has been life-changing. It has connected us to our community in a unique way, encouraging tough conversations about health and food justice and also the way our cultures connect us with nature, and the ability to grow food.”

Swale is an undertaking that came together with enormous labour and diligence against all odds. Its young caretakers must embrace Swale and make it their own, while also acknowledging that ultimately no one has complete ownership over this travelling, accessible-to-anyone project. “The young people were changed instantly by just being aboard Swale, giving them the opportunity to engage as leaders and educators, not just onlookers.” (Rodriguez, 2017) The growing Swale team continues to work on shifting policies that will increase the presence of edible public lands leveraging petitions and partnerships with stewardship groups in local parks as part of their efforts. Because it’s easy to ignore something that doesn’t affect you directly, Swale tackles food and income disparities by opening up options for more people to get involved and have more agency in the fabric of their city in unique ways.

Since wealth does not have border restrictions and wealth disparities continue to increase, to paraphrase systems scientist Donella Meadows,[4] there will always be someone wealthy enough to buy the last fish, and someone who needs to hunt it. Today, imagining limits to growth is not enough. What is necessary is a re-visioning of the dominant narratives that presume exponential growth is a forgone conclusion. A philosophical shift is needed that values maintenance, repair, and a transformation of purpose. This shift is reflected in Arne Naess’s principles of deep ecology: “The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living.”[5]

Re-visioning dominant narratives is the impetus behind Ecotopian Library. Organizationally, objects are not categorized by section, but are grouped based on the tangential relationships that library docents find between objects. Given that each part is interdependent, these object-groupings have more potential as change agents when they are treated fluidly together. In societies reliant on rigid hierarchical categorization (that presumes the integrity of isolated objects), Ecotopian Library is challenging our normative thinking around the relationship between things. In January 2020, the first version of Ecotopian Library was created at the University of Colorado in Boulder. There, artists contributed eclectic and story-driven sculptural objects; environmental justice activists performed loss; students and teachers shared important literature around the arts, geology, Indigenous land-based knowledge and animism; and neighbours shared earthly matter including fossils of Colorado’s geologic plant life and soil stories from the Great Plains. 

When asked for comments after spending three days in Ecotopian Library at UofC Boulder, J. Wilson reflects on their visit: “Seeing water from Standing Rock while listening to stories from Water Protectors and later reading through [Elinor] Ostrom’s Governing the Commons made me realize I’ve been sidetracked from focusing on longer-term thinking and change.” The invitation to reimagine daily life through an ecological-utopian lens and focus on mutual aspirations inspires Wilson to “determine that my thesis will be based on a local superfund site and land remediation. This will move me towards policy work that is in line with eco-justice and Rights to Nature.” 

Because Ecotopian Library asks visitors to re-imagine daily life through an ecological-utopian lens and focus on mutual aspirations, it can be part of cultivating systemic change of purpose.

Making art in the public realm is often about the formation and negotiation of public space. It involves compromise, but that doesn’t make it less effective. Maintenance and flexibility are just as important, if not more, than the initial impulse. If enacting compromise and valuing maintenance both threaten to bring inertia to the possibility of larger change, then alongside insisting “another world is possible” part of what artists can do is to insist through action, “another world exists, and together we enact it.” Swale and Ecotopian Library both seek to move from positions of defense to offense: from defending common space to ensuring that commons proliferate. Public artwork prefigures what is possible by building platforms for neighbours and strangers to envision together. There, they can aim to take visioning as far as possible until it can be a part of coalition building, involving larger groupings of people developing momentum, and artworks can become catalysts for transforming places from areas of extraction to areas of regeneration. 

References:

[1] A food desert is defined by the 2008 Farm Bill as an “area in the United States with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, particularly such an area composed of predominantly lower-income neighborhoods and communities.” U.S. Department of Agriculture ERS. USDA Food Desert Locator documentation. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service (accessed August 23, 2020).

[2] Ostrom, Elinor. 2015. Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action.

[3] Residents in the South Bronx have one of the highest asthma disease rates in the country exacerbated by the daily 15,000 trucks to and from the largest food distribution center on the East Coast of the U.S. 2006. “A Study Links Trucks’ Exhaust to Bronx Schoolchildren’s Asthma.” The New York Times. October 29. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/nyregion/29asthma.html (accessed August 23, 2020).

[4] Donella Meadows, Sustainable Systems, (1999; Ann Arbor; University of Michigan Ross School of Business; 2013), VHS. 

[5] Keller, David R. 2010. Environmental ethics: the big questions. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Mary Mattingly is an artist in residence at the Brooklyn Public Library where she is developing Ecotopian Library, a learning centre for art and creativity in the face of climate change. She founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City to circumvent public land laws.

Guest Editor: Jessie Andjelic